PPAF President

Dr. Leana Wen

Meet our new president, and the first doctor to lead the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in nearly 50 years.

A Video Message from Dr. Leana Wen

Dr. Wen has fought against attacks on reproductive rights and access to health care. And she will keep fighting as the President of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

As Commissioner of Health for the City of Baltimore, Dr. Wen has fought to protect women and families in Baltimore from Trump administration rollbacks to basic health care protections.

In March 2018, on behalf of Dr. Wen and the Baltimore City Health Department, the City of Baltimore sued the Trump administration for cutting teen pregnancy prevention funds, which resulted in a federal judge ordering the restoration of $5 million in grant funding to two Baltimore-based teen pregnancy prevention programs.

She has fought Trump administration changes to the Title X program to protect funding for 23 health clinics in Baltimore providing reproductive health care for women with low incomes. As a practicing physician, she organized thousands of doctors and health professionals against President Trump’s proposed domestic gag rule.

Dr. Leana Wen, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President

In August of 2018, Dr. Wen helped lead a lawsuit against the Trump administration for intentionally and unlawfully sabotaging the Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing health care for thousands of people in Baltimore.

Dr. Wen was born in Shanghai, China, and immigrated to the United States with her family just before her eighth birthday. She and her parents were granted political asylum, and they became U.S. citizens in 2003.

Dr. Wen graduated summa cum laude from California State University, Los Angeles at the age of 18, and earned her medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine before becoming a Rhodes Scholar. She obtained her master’s degrees at the University of Oxford and completed her residency training at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School. During medical school, she was elected president of the American Medical Student Association and took a year off to fulfill her leadership duties, including leading 65,000 physicians-in-training to fight for universal health and advocate for reproductive rights.

Growing up, Dr. Wen, her mother and her sister relied on Planned Parenthood for health care. During medical school, she volunteered at a Planned Parenthood health center in St. Louis.

Dr. Wen has received recognition as Modern Healthcare’s 50 Most Influential Physician Executives and Leaders and Top 25 Minority Executives in Healthcare. A Fellow of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine and Academy of Medicine, she served on the faculty at the George Washington University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2016, Dr. Wen was honored to be the recipient of the American Public Health Association’s highest award for local public health work. In 2017, she was named one of GOVERNING magazine's Public Officials of the Year.

Dr. Wen is married to Sebastian Walker, and they have a 1-year-old son.

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